For those of you unfamiliar with Robots.txt, it is a file that webmasters use to help control what aspects of their websites are indexed by search engines and what parts are not to be indexed. This is a great way to give you full control of how they view your website and help avoid duplicate content penalities, but using a Robots.txt has to be done properly and responsibly in order to avoid making matters worse or accidentally preventing your website from being indexed all together!

There are a lot of posts out there that talk about a Robots.txt file, how to set one up, etc. Unfortunately, many of these posts don’t apply specifically to WordPress and can often get confusing when you are trying to implement one for your website. Others tend to leave out a lot of important information that most people should have prior to attempting to add a Robots.txt file to their blog’s root directory.

Ask Apache is offering a Robots.txt file and updated Robots.txt file that you can download and use for your blog. You’ll of course want to customize it to meet your needs, including adding any directories that you have created since installing the base WordPress install that you don’t want them to be indexed.

I recommend you bookmark these posts if you plan to tackle adding a Robots.txt to your blog at some point in the future. Both posts provide a lot of valuable information and, as mentioned above, includes actual templates you can use for your website.

I recently got an e-mail from a reader wanting to know how to hide their sub-categories in WordPress. If you use WordPress 2.1 or newer, this is actually really easy to do.

All you need to do is open your stylesheet and add the following anywhere:

.children {
display:none;
}

You can also style the children accordingly this way if you’d like!

As blogging continues to evolve and WordPress themes continue to become more functional, it is my belief that we will start to see more themes using tabs to help manage sidebar content. The problem with sidebar tabs is that they require Javascript to use, so very few themes seem to be using them.

I won’t claim to be a whiz with javascript, but I found that creating tabs was not overly difficult. I’ve recently switched a section of my sidebar over to tabs on my other primary blog, Slick Affiliate, to help manage my sidebar content. So far I am very happy with the results. It allows me to provide readers with a bunch of different site navigation options while not really taking up any extra room, so people that want it can use and it isn’t in the way for people that don’t want to browse archives or see my top commentators.

If you are interested in doing something similar for your weblog, Headset Options wrote a series of posts studying the anatomy of a Magazine WordPress theme. The second post is actually dedicated to covering some types of javascript and focuses on Domtab and Tabber. You’ll find a nice examination and then a tutorial of how to add this to your WordPress blog. If you aren’t familiar with either type of javascript, I recommend you start with Tabber, as it is quite a bit easier to work with in my opinion.

What is your opinion of sidebar tabs? Do you find it more convenient or does it make the content harder to find?

Have you ever noticed how some pages on blogs behave different than on other pages? One of the most under-utilised features of WordPress is the wide variety of conditional tags available in WordPress. Through the use of conditional tags, you can instruct certain plugins, pictures, or code to only appear on designated pages.

Recently I ran across a post by the Undersigned explaining Conditional Tags in WordPress, which appears was written in 2006 but is still valid with current versions of WordPress.

Here is a list of the conditional tags available:

• is_home()
• is_single()
• is_page()
• is_category()
• is_author()
• is_date()
• is_year()
• is_month()
• is_day()
• is_time()
• is_archive()
• is_search()
• is_paged()
• is_404()

One of my favorite places to use conditional tags is in the post meta area. For example, on most pages I want the comments button to display, but I don’t need it to appear on the single page because the comments are displayed on that page. At the same time, I like having an edit button on the single page, but I don’t need it on any other pages.

Here is the code I use for the above example on one of my sites:

<?php if (is_single()){ ?> <?php edit_post_link(__(”*Edit*”), ”); ?> <?php } else { ?> | <?php comments_popup_link(’0 comments’, ‘1 comment’, ‘% comments’); ?> <?php } ?>

The bold code is the conditional tags I’ve set up.  You can see from the above code that I am telling WordPress to only display an Edit button on single pages, and on all other pages display the comments link.

What other good uses have you found for conditional tags?

This guest post was written by Jeffro of Jeffro2pt0. Jeffro is a WordPress enthusiast who writes a lot about WordPress and maintains a WordPress Weekly podcast. If you have WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a guest post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

Ever wanted that ability to show your bio information within your WordPress profile at the bottom of every post? For single user blogs, this might not be practical. But for multi-authored blogs, adding the bio info of each author at the bottom of their respective posts is a good way to give props to the author as well as providing information to the readers as to who that person is without having to refer to an about me page. The good news is that, you don’t need to install a plugin to have this functionality.

Inside of a user profile is this nifty little box where you can place information about yourself. As you can see, I have already placed some info into the box for reference later on in the tutorial. We are going to take the information in this box and display it at the bottom of every post that is under my name.

The template tag we are going to focus on is <?php the_author_description(); ?> This tag doesn’t accept any parameters, so don’t bother trying to do anything funky with this tag. Now, head to your templates Style sheet and add this to it:

.postauthor { }

This will give us the opportunity to style the postauthor bit when it’s published in the post. Now that we have the template tag in order, we will need to place it within the loop.

I’m not going to delve into the specifics of the loop, but in general, it deals with the information related to posts. Browse to your themes index.php file and look for something like this:

< ?php the_content('Read the rest of this entry »'); ?>

That is what it looks like in my theme, it may look different in yours, but this is the function that displays the content of the post. Underneath of this content function is where you would want to place the following code:

< div class="postauthor ">< ?php the_author_description(); ? >< /div>

Please keep in mind that if the code does not work, it is most likely due to the spaces which I had to add in order for the code to properly appear within this post. Simply remove the spaces, and the code should be just fine.

Now that you have the author description function in place, this is what it might look like on your blog:

If you ask me, this looks bland and boring. We need to fix that by editing the div class called Postauthor within the CSS file and give that Div class a nice look. You can style it to match your blog design, but for the sake of this tutorial, I’ll display the CSS code which makes it appear like the TAG div container shown below the Post Author.

.postauthor {
color: #222222;
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 14px;
font-weight: normal;
background: #EAEAEA;
border-top: 2px solid #000000;
border-bottom: 1px solid #000000;
width: 640px;
padding: 3px;
margin-bottom:5px;
}

This CSS style code turns that small black text into something like this:

Roughly four months ago I talked a bit about how to set up your blog so only the admin can see an edit button on blog posts. For whatever reason, I’ve always set this up on each of my websites and really get a lot of use out of it. Much along those same lines, Michael of WPCandy has written a post explaining how to display content so only the admin can view it. This goes well beyond the edit button and allows you to setup just about anything to display for the admin.

In hist post, Michael provides some code that looks at the user id to determine if the user has admin privileges and then displays whatever you tell it to for that user. Here is the code:

<?php global $user_ID; if( $user_ID ) : ?>
<?php if( current_user_can('level_10') ) : ?>
<a href=”http://yourdomainurl.com/stats/“>Stats</a>
<?php else : ?>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php endif; ?>

If you run a multi-author blog and would like to make this stuff available to editors, authors, contributors, and more, you can easily adjust the user level to determine who sees your display.

Great find Michael!